


the new world

by twistedsky



Series: the end of everything [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-03
Updated: 2014-09-03
Packaged: 2018-02-15 22:08:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2245056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedsky/pseuds/twistedsky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set in the future. Everyone is moving on with their lives when suddenly the world is invaded, and life quickly becomes some sort of post-apocalyptic nightmare. Here, Scott and Lydia try to find a way home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the new world

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by a weird little dream I had a few weeks ago. I own nothing. The timeline and the tenses are a bit scattered.

Lydia wakes up in a shabby motel room and she doesn’t, not even for a brief moment, forget where she is.

It’s been this way for 117 days.

The only things that change are how disgusting the motel rooms are, how scared she is when she goes to sleep at night, and whether or not they have a room at all. They tend to stick to motels(and the occasional public library or stores that are unattractive to looters), because the idea of hiding out in someone else's house unnerves the both of them. 

They do their best, but Lydia and Scott live like fugitives now. If you don't want the Visitors to decide to take notice of you, then your best bet is to stay in the shadows, or the middle of nowhere, as much as possible.

The Visitors have eradicated the economic systems of the world, and all that’s left is terrible, crap food and whatever supplies are still being produced/are left over, because the Visitors have deemed most things unnecessary. Their control is extensive, and spreading with each passing day. Lydia thinks they'll lose interest in running down every last human on earth, and she hopes it'll be sooner rather than later.

Lydia tries not to dwell on that, and grasps at the comfort of her dream as long as possible—but sadly, she's awakened all too quickly, and the pleasantness has already completely faded.

Her back aches, like it always does.

She gets up and digs through her duffle for something to change into—nowadays, they sleep in cars as often as they do in crappy motel rooms, and they never stay in one place for too long.

You either choose to live inside the city gates that the Visitors built for their communities—and, well, Lydia feels _death_ from those areas, so that’s certainly out of the question—or you risk the Visitors choosing to take you.

Either way, the situation isn't ideal by any standards.

They’ve heard stories of people who are holed up deep enough in the country, somewhere in the woods or the mountains, who live without that daily worry. But the larger the community, the larger your chances of being found out.

You have to find your own paradise in a world with an increasing amount of hell.

Lydia pulls a relatively clean shirt over her head and doesn’t even look mournfully at the bathroom, imagining a shower as she once had.

Day 27, she thinks, strict water rationing. She reaches for her packet of baby wipes, and makes a note to tell Scott she wants to stop the next time they come across a relatively clean body of water.

She could tell you all of the significant statutes.

Day 4, major forms of transportation such as airplanes, trains and boats are no longer allowed(the 'for your own safety' tacked onto the end of the new law had made her laugh). Day 30, individuals who choose to stay outside of the system may not take part in any of the system’s benefits, such as foodstuffs, housing, etc.

Lydia hears a noise and reaches for her gun—Day 10, all weapons are to be surrendered to your gracious Visitors—and lowers it when she hears Scott’s safety knock.

Scott walks in, and Lydia is grateful to see him. 

He’s all she has left now, and there’s something to be said for not being alone.

She tries not to let herself wonder where the others might be, because they’re probably dead anyway. There’s no sense in wondering anymore. Scott hopes they’re still home, still safe. Lydia is less optimistic, but sometimes she lets herself believe (sometimes for Scott, and sometimes for herself).

Scott smiles at her, and she smiles back, slightly.

He’s exhausted, so she walks forward to see what he’d managed to get this time, so that he can get as much of a nap as he can before they have to get back in the car and keep driving.

 “I don’t suppose you got me anything pretty?” Lydia asks lightly. She doubts it, because there’s not much around. On one hand, that’s a blessing, because they don’t run into many people, but on the other hand, that means there’s not much to scavenge.

They have a few small piles of new resources from the night before when the two of them had gone through every room in the place. Thankfully, there hadn’t been anyone else around.

Too often meeting other people ends in death, or at the very least injury.

“I found a clothing store down the road, so I grabbed some stuff around our sizes,” Scott tells her, smiling slightly, like he’s hoping that’ll cheer her up. "It looked like it had already been ransacked, so there weren't a lot of options," he admits with a wince. "Sorry.

The promise of new clothes actually manages to cheer her up a little. “Amazing,” she says, reaching out to squeeze his hand.

He holds onto it, and she lets him.

Day 46, unnecessary physical contact or affection will be punished by permanent relocation into a more carefully monitored zone.

Day 48, human copulation is hereby strictly prohibited and to be punished by death.

It’s nice, for a moment, to feel the warmth of human contact.

It isn’t that Lydia has any intention of copulating with Scott, but there are enough traitors to the human race to make publicly disobeying rules occasionally dangerous(especially when they venture into populated areas).

“What’s the food situation like?” Lydia asks.

“Terrible, mostly,” Scott says with a sigh. “Mostly V-food, though I did find some beef jerky and a few cans of chili.”

Lydia closes her eyes and breathes deeply, steadying herself.

She opens her eyes and pulls her hand out of Scott’s gently. The V-food is dangerous, and beyond being disgusting, it’s packed full of mood controllers. “Beef jerky it is then,” Lydia says brightly, with false joy.

Scott shrugs slightly. “We’ve still got our store of food,” he reminds her. They’ve been hoarding as much as possible, but the more you have, the bigger a target you are for the other scavengers, and for the Visitors themselves.

“True, beef jerky and ramen noodles. Very nutritious,” Lydia says bitingly, then winces at the look on Scott’s face. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he says, but of course that’s what he says, he’s Scott.

If she were stuck with anyone else, Lydia’s pretty sure they’d have split up by now.

To be fair, she thinks, she’s not exactly stuck with Scott. She could leave, but what would the point of that be?

Lydia starts to poke through some of the bags, finding a surprising amount of beef jerky, the aforementioned clothes, and some other miscellaneous supplies. She looks around the room at their things, and contemplates how she’ll stack it in the car.

She sighs. “I think we might have to go up a size with the car. I really want to take that store of clean blankets and toilet paper.” 

Scott nods slightly, and Lydia notices that he’s a bit wobbly. “I’ve got this,” Lydia tells him. “You rest, and I’ll pick a car from the parking lot, siphon some gas, and pack it all up, okay?”

Scott shakes his head. “I’m fine,” he assures her, but she doesn’t feel assured at all. 

Lydia frowns.  “Fine,” she decides on a compromise, “You can help, but I’ll drive first this time.”

Scott narrows his eyes, clearly trying to figure out a reason why that might be a bad idea, and comes up with nothing. Technically, it's his turn to drive, but Lydia thinks he might be tired enough to have forgotten that. Plus, she'd managed to rest for a few hours while he was gone, and he's been out the entire time. “Do you want to go now?”

Lydia would rather that he slept on an actual bed for a while, but there’s no way he’ll agree to that when there’s still work to be done.

Lydia nods. “We might as well get on the road. It’ll be dark soon.”

Lydia gives a slight yearning glance at the bags of clothing, and then sighs.

Time to get to work.

~~

The day the Visitors arrived, Lydia was in Connecticut for school.

She’d gotten through most of her first semester at Yale before the end of the world had arrived.

It figures that she’d work so hard to survive, to thrive, and it would all be undone in an instant.

~~

She’s asleep when it’s happening, and she wakes up from her nap to panic.

There’s chaos everywhere, and a dozen voicemails on her phone, and text messages from everyone she knows.

It takes her about two and a half minutes to find the first announcement.

_Surrender_.

From there she’s lost in a shuffle, and she feels the urge to scream, and so she does, a violent banshee screech.

People are dying.

~~

She gets a call from Stiles first, who promises that they’ll come for her(most of the group stayed in-state for college, which means that she is the lone person away from them all, unless you count Isaac, but no one has had any idea what he’s been doing for a while now).

“Is there anywhere safe you can go until tomorrow?” Stiles asks, and Lydia rolls her eyes.

Is anywhere safe, she wants to ask, but she doesn’t. It’s all relative, she reminds herself. She closes her eyes and breathes deeply. “I could try locking myself in my room,” she says. She’s not sure that’ll work, but what else can she do? It’s better to stay where she feels safe then go somewhere where she doesn’t even recognize her surroundings.

Her roommate is off crying with friends, and from the look of her, she won’t be coming back any time soon, if at all. Lydia can easily lock her room down and eat her little store of snacks until the next day.

“Okay,” Stiles says. “We’ll be there to get you.”

Lydia is somehow unsurprised to open her door to Scott the next day.

It’s unsurprising that he’d be there, but oddly surprising that he’s the only one.

“They’re hiding out,” Scott answers her silent question.

She’s tempted to ask why, but when they walk outside of her dorm building to see utter chaos, she doesn’t need to.

~~

The truth is that they don’t even know where they’re going, not really. They travel for weeks in a vague, general direction. That needs to change, Lydia thinks. She needs to make a plan. She resolves to grab the next maps they come across, though who knows when that might be.

Millions of people have already been murdered by the Visitors—“It’s funny that they call themselves that,” Lydia says one day while they’re driving through countryside(it’s safer that way, they’ve noticed). “Visitors,” she says with so much venom she’s surprised it’s not physically dripping from her lips.

“I think it’s part of their psychological warfare,” Scott says, and Lydia is reminded again that Scott is much smarter than most people give him credit for.

She’s constantly reminded of that these days.

“They want us to think of them as benevolent guests, just visiting, taking in the sights.”

“It’s working,” Lydia says. “With some people, at least.” Some people are so desperate to survive that they ignore the blood in the streets and the screams of innocent people being murdered for resisting.

Scott nods his head and keeps driving.

They’ve got thousands of miles to go to get home.

“Do you think they’re okay?” Scott asks. Lydia doesn't have to ask who he's talking about.

“I don’t know,” Lydia says.

She remembers bloodied bodies being taken away by the Visitors in the last city they’d risked going through, and thinks that there are far worse things than death now.

~~

Lydia knows how to hotwire a car.

Scott is somehow not even remotely surprised by this—the women in his life always seem to have such talents, and it certainly comes in handy, so there’s no reason to question it, he supposes.

He’d flown into a nearby city as soon as he’d gotten a chance(on one of the last flights out, though he hadn’t known it at the time).

There hadn’t really been much of a debate over the matter. Lydia was their friend, and she was stuck all of the way across the country, and so of course it made sense to send someone to go get her.

Stiles had taken the opportunity to explain that he’d always thought splitting the pack up would bite them in the ass, and Scott had needed to remind himself that Stiles was worried, and irritated that they’d only been able to reserve one ticket, and frustrated that it made more sense for Scott to go to get Lydia than anyone else.

“You’re the Alpha,” Stiles had said. “You should be with your pack.”

“Our pack is fine, except Lydia,” Scott had pointed out. “And you guys are all together, and Lydia is all alone. I need to make sure she’s okay.”

That had resolved that situation. Sort of, anyway.

Stiles had argued a little more about how it was just a plane ride, and it didn’t really make sense to split Scott off from the rest of the pack—Scott had stayed patient, reminding himself that for all that Stiles and Malia have had some weird off and on relationship thing going on, that has never stopped Stiles from still caring deeply about Lydia.

Thankfully, despite the arguing, the last words Scott had spoken to Stiles had been positive.

“Be careful,” he’d said.

Stiles had smiled slightly. “Aren’t I always?”

“I’m serious,” he’d said.

Stiles’s smile had faded. “You too, Scott.”

And after a brief hug, Scott had left.

Stealing cars is probably the opposite of careful, Scott thinks.

To be fair, of course, it hadn’t been his idea.

~~

They try desperately to get a flight back to California, or at least just out of the city, but that doesn’t work. The city is beginning to change before their eyes, and so they decide to drive.

“I don’t have a car,” Lydia points out, clearly exasperated. “My mom didn’t think I’d need one while at college, which, thank you mother, is clearly not true.”

Lydia’s mother is with Scott’s own mother—safe and sound in Beacon Hills. It’s a little out of the way and small enough that it should be safe(or, at least, that’s what Scott had hoped when he’d left his mother safely with the pack.

He hadn’t wanted to leave her. He hadn’t felt right about it at all, but he’d also thought he’d be back the next day on a plane.

He looks to Lydia, who is writing in a notebook she’d brought from her dorm room. “I like the black one,” she says suddenly, pointing towards a car in the on-campus parking lot.

“What if someone needs it—“ Scott begins to point out, and Lydia shakes her head.

“Someone does need it,” Lydia says firmly. “We do.”

~~

They stop at a grocery store to get some food, and people are looting.

Scott looks down at his wallet, and Lydia sighs. “It’s the apocalypse,” she says.

When they walk in and there’s no one even at the register, it’s clear that that’s true.

A bald man with a machete grabs Lydia’s arm as they walk down an aisle with a shopping cart. Lydia kicks him between his legs, and Scott sends him a look with fangs and claws and all when the man looks to retaliate.

Scott and Lydia continue down the aisle and Lydia reaches for all the chocolate that’s left, which is sadly not much.

Someone, she thinks, had had the right idea.

Scott cocks his head to the side, and she shrugs.

“This could be the last chocolate we ever eat,” she points out.

Scott frowns, and then nods. She watches him grab a box of fudge pops out of the freezer before they leave. He offers one to her, and she takes it. 

After all, it could be the last ice cream she ever eats.

~~

They make a huge mistake by driving through Illinois, because they get a little too close to Chicago, which has been taken over by the Visitors, and completely rebuilt as far as they can tell.

It’s a community for peacefully-minded individuals, the signs say.

It’s hard to believe that considering that they’ve heard stories of Visitors beating humans to death, just because they can. 

Lydia worries that one day they’ll come across something awful like that happening, and Scott will get involved and end up captured.

They come close to such a point in Chicago.

It’s human on human violence, and Scott looks ready to intervene as he has every other time they’ve come across any kind of unnecessary violence or bullying.

This time is different though, and Lydia can tell. She reaches out for Scott’s arm and clamps her fingers onto it so hard that her nails draw blood. His arm heals quickly, but her hand stays put.

“Lydia, I—“

Lydia shakes her head and wordlessly tilts her heads toward a Visitor patrol.

“We should at least warn them—“ Scott says, but Lydia silences him with a look.

“It’s too late,” she says, and she knows that he knows she’s right. He looks defeated, and she supposes he is. 

Later, she hears him empty his entire stomach’s contents into the toilet in the disgusting hotel room they'd found, and she bites her tongue so hard it bleeds to stop herself from crying from the shame.

They made the right choice, she tells herself.

They have to survive to fight another day.

~~

Now, Lydia plots their return to California on the maps she begins to collect whenever possible. She chooses the routes carefully, avoiding anything even resembling a city painstakingly.

She isn’t sure if she can live with herself like this for much longer if she doesn’t, and she knows that Scott can’t.

She can feel his suffering, and his shame and guilt.

They find a relatively nice bed and breakfast a few days later, and Lydia is so happy to see a comfortable, clearly clean room that she suggests that they stay an extra day.

The owners of the bed and breakfast are still around, unlike most of the places they’ve been staying.

It’s a slow trip home, Lydia thinks, accepting tea and biscuits from the nice older woman who offers them.

They’ve been taking roundabout ways through everything to try and stay safe—not just from the Visitors, but from the motorcycle gangs, the scavengers, and all of the other people who are already trying to find a way to profit off of the invasion.

Scott is quiet until they go back till their room that night.

They’re sharing because it’s safer this way, there’s no need to risk splitting up. Lydia doesn’t think of the first hotel they’d stayed in—no, she doesn’t think about waking up with a gun to her head, and she certainly doesn’t think about calling for Scott, who had only arrived from the next room over just in time to see her struggle for the gun and shoot the man who’d had it pointed at her.

She doesn’t let her think about things like that, not anymore.

There’s only one bed, which is no longer even remotely awkward for them, and Lydia waves away his attempt to sleep in a chair. He makes the effort every time, in case she needs space for herself. She appreciates that, and never takes him up on it. “It’s a big enough bed for the both of us,” she points out.

They both face the ceiling for a while, and Lydia inexplicably thinks of Allison.

She thinks about Allison a lot lately though, so maybe it’s not so inexplicable.

“Your thoughts are very loud,” Scott says suddenly, breaking into her thoughts.

She could lie, but he’d know it. With some people she’d still respond with the lie anyway though, just because she doesn’t owe them the truth, and she simply doesn’t care, but with Scott—well, Scott is different.

“I was thinking about Allison, and how much easier this would all be if she were here.”

Scott is silent for a moment. “A lot of things would have been easier if Allison were still here,” he says softly.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“It’s okay,” he assures her. “I miss her too.” It’s been almost two years since she died, and Lydia can still remember how it felt to feel the death of her best friend.

She doesn’t let herself think about that too often either.

Lydia sighs, and tries to relax, and Scott moves over slightly to give her more room.

They lie there in silence.

Lydia reaches out her hand to clasp Scott’s, and thinks of the declaration the Visitors had made about physical contact.

It’s strange, she thinks. It seems petty almost, and ridiculous because how can you really, truly monitor that? She remembers the videos the Visitors had released where they’d killed over a thousand people from around the world who had been caught ‘fraternizing.' She shudders, and Scott moves a little closer under the blanket to share his warmth with her, because he thinks she’s cold.

The Visitors want humanity to die out. She’s definitely cold, she thinks.

The Visitors could probably destroy them all with such ease, but it seems that they want humanity to suffer first. She squeezes Scott’s hand, and is comforted when he squeezes back.

~~

Around midnight, Scott wakes up. Something is wrong, and he knows it.

Lydia wakes up screaming seconds later, and Scott prepares to fight.

He grabs her hand and pulls her along through the hallway, and they see a group of men and women laughing at the sweet old couple who owned the bed and breakfast. Their throats have already been slit.

This is already over, Scott realizes with a pang.

“Run, Lydia—“ Scott says, and Lydia does. Lydia has enough blood on her hands already, she doesn't need more.

Scott fights them all off—swiping and knocking people into each other, and being careful not to kill them, despite the seething pain he feels in the pit of his stomach.

There is no justice for these murders, he realizes.

He leaves to find Lydia waiting in the car, ready to take off as soon as he jumps in.

“I would have killed them with my bare hands,” Lydia tells him, and he’s not sure if that makes him feel better or worse.

He’s not a killer, he reminds himself.

Some days it’s harder to believe that than others.

They feel even less safe after this stop.

Scott has nightmares for weeks, and all Lydia can do is hold his hand.

She could lie to him too, she supposes, and tell him that it's all going to be okay, but she can't bring herself to do it.

~~

They switch cars on occasion, in part because Lydia is paranoid, and in part because sometimes they have to abandon everything in order to get away from a sticky situation.

They constantly have to find new food, new clothes, new everything.

It’s tiring, she thinks, scraping away everything that they have and then trying to get everything back again over and over again.

Other times, she hopes desperately for a chance to start over, like when they’ve been driving for days and they can’t stop for more than a chance to fill up the tank and search for some food. They take turns driving and sleeping, and worrying about everything.

The struggle to avoid major highways is making the trip even longer than it should be, and it’s already exhausting as it is.

Lydia went on a cross-country trip with her parents once, and she’d hated every second of it.

This is worse than that, but at least she’s not in the company of people who hate each other. Instead, she has Scott, who is at least _nice_ to her, and often more than that.

She’s not sure what she’s supposed to _do_ anymore.

She thinks of the young, clever girl she used to be, before things got complicated—before werewolves, kanimas, _banshees_ —and sometimes, she misses her.

That’s not entirely true, she thinks. She rarely _doesn’t_ miss the girl she was, and the simple days before life became _this._

~~

Lydia is not a terrible shot. Between early, casual lessons with Allison, and then intense lessons with Braeden and Allison’s dad the summer after that whole dead pool situation, she’d been forced to learn to defend herself, both with weapons and her bare hands.

She’s not amazing at it, but she can protect herself in most situations.

Scott has been training non-stop for a while now, just to make sure he can protect everyone(the world is not on your shoulders, she wants to tell him, but he just wants to _help_ , and she can’t possibly get angry at him for that).

Now, they don’t have a lot of time for training, but it’s never been more important.

Sadly, they get a lot of practice. There’s always someone who wants to take advantage of weaker people, who can’t see the steel in Lydia’s eyes or the power in Scott’s.

They try to avoid people as best as they can, but it’s such a long trip that it doesn’t always turn out that way.

She swings baseball bat at some asshole’s head at the border between Utah and Nevada, and wishes for home when he collapses to the ground, and then she whacks him again for good measure, picks up her bag, and helps Scott up.

They’re almost home, she thinks that night in the car as Scott drives. It shouldn’t take so long to get home, she thinks.

It takes about two days non-stop to get home, if you take almost no breaks and drive along major highways.

But they’ve made their way through half of the states in the country because she thinks this’ll keep them safer. They'd detoured through both of the Dakotas at one point, because everywhere they'd turned they'd run into Visitor patrols or motorcycle gangs.

Scott implicitly trusts that the fact that it’ll have taken them almost five months to get home is _reasonable._

~~

To be fair, they haven’t been traveling non-stop.

There are times when they stay only a day in a given place(sometimes only a few hours at that), and then others when they’ll spend a week.

Once, they’d found a small town that hadn’t devolved into in chaos, and they’d stayed there for almost two weeks.

It was beautiful, a bit like a tiny paradise.

They’d wanted to leave after a few days, because they’d started to feel slight guilt.

They needed to get home—but they’d been on the road for over two months at this point, and the idea that there was a safe place was incredibly enticing.

That paradise is consumed by blood and flames.

~~

The Visitors are terrifying.

They look like robots, and they’re impervious to every kind of weapon that Scott and Lydia have seen used against them, and they kill without mercy.

They don’t seem to have any kind of motivation besides destruction and cruelty, which Lydia finds strange.

They seem to be intent on wreaking havoc on the human race—on destroying them with death and chaos and psychological warfare.

It doesn’t make sense, Lydia tells Scott, and he agrees.

He wonders if they’ll ever make sense, and Lydia doesn’t know what to say.

On occasion, she imagines taking one apart and discovering every little nuance of them. She wonders what the Visitor’s home is like, if they’ve done this to civilizations before(and from the ease with which they’ve taken over this planet, Lydia tends to think they’ve done it many, many times before).

Lydia and Scott have never directly confronted a Visitor. To do so would be foolish, and likely end in death.

~~

Once or twice they end up on foot.

The first time it only lasts about a day and a half, but the second lasts nearly two weeks, and happens in the middle of the desert. 

Nevada is not kind to them.

They're dehydrated and bone-tired when they get near the border, and come across an abandoned fast food restaurant. Most of the food has spoiled or been stolen, but they find some water, and they rest in an abandoned car parked outside with the air conditioning on full blast.

Scott's sunburn heals quickly while they consume a giant jar of pickles between the two of them, and Lydia says no when Scott reaches for her arm to take some of her pain away, but her skin is bright red and her body  _aches_  more deeply than it's ever ached before, and so she lets him.

~~

They’re so close.

Scott is nervous now—full of anxiety and hope. Lydia tries not to get her hopes up, and she also tries to avoid thinking about the worst that it could be.

Maybe it’ll work out, she says. Maybe. She reaches for Scott’s hand when they enter California, and even though it’s long past dawn, they keep driving.

They’ll be home soon.

Lydia forgets the burn of her skin, and the aches of her body, and smiles despite herself.

"Almost home," Scott says with far too much hope.

~~

"Day 147, Scott and Lydia reach the ruins of Beacon Hills," Lydia says, trying to ignore the hysteria she feels building within her.

Home is unrecognizable.

She feels a violent surge of anger, and then Scott takes her hand, squeezing it gently.

She closes her eyes and breathes deeply, trying to stay calm.

She has no idea what comes next.

 


End file.
